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Testimonials
Whether the web development company’s testimonials are no frills text based or high tech video testimonials, you should not take them at face value. Take your investigation a step further and call up your prospective web design company’s past clients and ask them how the project went.
Portfolio
These are always great to look through to get an idea of the style of the web designer. Many website design companies do tend to follow certain styles and stick to niches. The question you need to ask is can you see them doing a fantastic job of your website based on their past work?
Experience in your industry sector
You can get a good idea of their level of experience by looking through their portfolio. Another way is to speak to one of their designers and get a feel for how they communicate with you.
Reliability
It is fair to say that lots of companies tend to shy away from smaller web design companies and one man bands because if the sole web designers falls ill then the project may be delayed. It is always worth examining what contingency is in place to mitigate project risk.
Communication Skills
Taking a large scale web design project from inception to completion can be tricky and ultimate project success depends upon whether the “real” requirements have been realised. Unfortunately too many IT projects fail because the project manager’s key objectives are either time or budget based so watch out. The best communicators will ask you the right questions to extract the requirements from you. The greatest communicators will go that extra mile and ask your users! Ultimately, they will take the lead because they are the web design experts.
